What Can Go Wrong with a Hard Drive?

There are two general types of damage to a disk:

• Physical Damage:  There may be a piece of dust or a tiny scratch on the disk.  Physical damage is reported as bad clusters on the disk.  Although no repair program can retrieve the data that was originally in the bad clusters, Fix-It Utilities can set those clusters aside and ensure they are never used again.  If it is critical that data from a bad cluster be recovered, check out the Fix-It Crisis Center.

• Data Damage: Although most programs behave themselves, some renegade (or badly designed) programs may overwrite critical files such as the boot sector, the system registry, or the File Allocation Table.  If this happens, your computer may not boot without a System Rescue Disk.  It may also crash, before you realize what happened.

As with most hardware, the best defense is a good offense.  In other words, if you maintain your system with Fix-It Utilities, you extend its life, increase its performance and decrease the risk of serious problems.  Disk and Files is a great way to stop trouble before it happens.  This set of tools restores lost disk space, optimizes your disk for fast data retrieval and storage, and maintains your Windows file system.  The tools include Disk Fixer, Disk Cleaner, File Undeleter and Disk Verifier.  Running these tools regularly is an important part of good system maintenance.

Maintaining Your Hard Drive with Fix-It Disk Fixer

Disk Fixer is a great maintenance tool for your hard drive.  It can perform the following tasks:

• Partition tables check: Check the individual partition boot records and header data structures against the master boot record.
• Boot records: Check boot records for valid information and structure.
• File allocation tables: Look for invalid entries in the FAT (FAT/FAT32 systems only).  If possible, fixes them.
• Files: Verify the directory structure, looking for invalid directory contents and file sizes.  Also makes sure that the entries refer to valid data and checks that two files don't both refer to the same data (cross-linked files).
• Dates and times: Verify that every file is stamped with a valid data and time.  Any files with invalid information are given the current date and time.
• File name: Verify that every file has a valid file name.  Occasionally a corrupted file may contain invalid characters in its name, making it inaccessible to the operating system.  This test locates these files and fixes them.
• Lost cluster chains: Locate lost clusters and either recycle them as free space or make them into files so that you can review the data.

Optionally, Disk Fixer can perform a complete check of the entire disk surface, reading each sector to verify its quality.

Disk Fixer performs many of the same functions as the Microsoft product ScanDisk.   However, it goes several steps further:

• Disk Fixer is faster than ScanDisk.
• Disk Fixer does a more complete and thorough analysis of partition tables and boot sectors.
• Disk Fixer catches and fixes many minor file errors.
• You can fix multiple drives, not just one at a time.
• Disk Fixer can notify you each time it finds a problem, allowing you to address each problem or issue individually.

Recovering Disk Space with Fix-It Disk Cleaner

Often unused files are left on the hard drive when software is uninstalled, programs crash, or other problems occur.  These files usually don't do direct harm, but they can take up a lot of extra space on the disk.

Disk Cleaner allows you to search the entire disk for unused files, and then it gives you choices as to what to do with them.  Disk Cleaner comes with a default set of categories to check, including web cache, empty files and folders, BAK files, README files, and more.  It also lets you create your own customized categories.  After it scans your disk you can delete the files, move them, zip (compress) them into one compressed file, or just leave them where they are.

Disk Cleaner tries to determine which files are safe to remove and which are not, but the choice is left up to you.    

Recovering lost data with File Undeleter

Sometimes, after a file is deleted, you may realize that you want it back.  If you want to recover a file you have deleted, File Undeleter may be able to restore it for you.   This is possible because deleted files are not actually removed from the disk.   The area on disk occupied by that file becomes available to be overwritten, but until that happens, the old data remain.

When you delete a file through Windows, it is actually moved to the Windows Recycle Bin.  When you clean out the Windows Recycle Bin, or delete files in other ways, the deleted files can be moved to Fix-It Utilities Deleted File Bin.  This is a small "cache" or receptacle that is a last-chance place for deleted files.

What about removable media?

How many times have you written a floppy disk or CD-ROM for someone and then been told that they couldn't read it?  What about backing an important file up and then not being able to recover it from a corrupted removable media?  These are frustrations that Fix-It can help you do without.  By running Disk Verifier you can verify that all files on a disk can be read, and it is specially designed to work with removable media like floppy disks, CD-ROMs and zip disks.